Welcome to English for Media Literacy, a course created by the University of Pennsylvania, and funded by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Office of English Language Programs.
To enroll in this course for free, click on “Enroll now” and then select "Full Course. No certificate."
This course is designed for non-native English speakers who are interested in learning more about U.S. media literacy. In this course, you will explore different types of mass media, such as newspapers, magazines, television, and social media. This course will also give you the opportunity to develop a broader understanding of the role media plays in our lives, while building your vocabulary and giving you the language skills needed to analyze what you read and watch. The first unit in this course will provide an introduction to media literacy and give you an opportunity to evaluate your own media literacy level. In unit 2, you will learn how to identify facts versus opinions in the media. The next unit in the course will focus on the differences between social media and traditional media, while unit 4 will look at how gender and identity are covered in the media. In the final unit of the course, you will demonstrate your increased media literacy by through a culminating final project on social media.
Development of this course was funded by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Office of English Language Programs. Unless otherwise noted, all course materials are available for re-use, repurposing and free distribution under a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution license.

Taught By

Lauren Fiori

Advising Specialist

Ian Nichols

Language Specialist

Transcript

Hello. I'm Sarah Arva Grosik and I'm an Associate Director at the University of Pennsylvania. I'll be your guest lecture for this video. And I'm here to talk to you today about how the media may stereotype women, and how the media describes women. Research has shown that women are seen and heard in media messages much less than men. When women are included in media messages, it is important to analyze the way in which they are described and possibly stereotypes in those messages. Like different racial, ethnic, and cultural groups, women may also be stereotyped in the media. One way the media might stereotype women is by only showing them in certain roles. For example, it is common to see women as nurses or teachers. You often see women on TV taking care of the children and cleaning the house. It is not as common to see women in positions of power such as a business leader, a doctor, or a lawyer. In addition, the media often shows the role of a woman only as it relates to their connection to a man. In other words, men are seen as central or key to the story and women are seen as secondary or less important. An example of this is when the woman in a story only exists as a love interest to the man. Because this happens so often in the media, the Bechdel test was created to analyze how women are shown in movies. This test was created by Alison Bechdel, an American cartoonist who creates comic strips. She introduced this test in one of her comic strips in 1985. And it is still being used today. To pass the Bechdel test, a movie must answer yes to the following three questions. First, are there more than two women in a movie? Second, do the two women talk to each other? And third, do they discuss something other than a man? It is amazing how many movies do not pass this test. Think of the last movie you watched. Would it pass the Bechdel test? The Bechdel test questions help us understand how women are shown in the media as opposed to how men are shown. The test helps us understand that while men in movies talk to each other often, and about many different topics, this is not true for women in movies. The way that women are described in the media may also be very different from men. The article you will read after this video provides a good example of this. It explains that men athletes at the Olympics were most often described as great, strong, and fastest. Women who were also athletes, competing in the same Olympics, in the same sports, were described very differently. They were most often described as aged, older, pregnant, and married. None of those words have anything to do with their athletic abilities. Some of those words like pregnant and mother are connected to the roles that the media often shows women in. The words aged and older focus more on the way the woman looks and not on their athletic ability. The media discusses the way a woman looks much more often than the way a man looks. When the media describes women in these ways and stereotypes them, they're sending messages about what it means to be a man or a woman, male or female. We should ask ourselves, is this really what it means to be a man or a woman, male or female? Are there other ways of thinking about these categories? To summarize, the media may stereotype women by putting them in certain roles and describing them in certain ways. This influences how we understand what it means to be a man or a woman. We must analyze if our understanding of these media messages is accurate.

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